2004 (28)

This is how we should read hexadecimal…

Today my five-year-old told me that when she was four, she thought that what came after ninety-nine was… tenty. You know, because seventy, eighty, ninety, tenty.

At first I thought it was just funny and charming, but then I realized it was actually a really good idea. Tenty is only nonsensical if you’re counting in base ten (or lower), but it makes total sense for higher bases.

How do people usually read 0xA0? “A-zero”? How unimaginative! Let’s read that “tenty” from now on!

Here are some more examples of how to read hexadecimal in a non-boring way:

@Simon, you're right of course. Fixed it. Did I proofread this? Apparently not.

@PerpetualKid: but of course, why did I not research Calvin and Hobbes for this? It's typically the sort of thing they would think about. So now we know that those are not imaginary numbers (which exist by the way), but instead that eleventeen would be decimal 21 (useful in bases 22 and up), and thirty-twelve 0x3C.

Love this, but I think we should look at alternatives to the thousands and millions denominators, since those are based on groups of three, whereas hexadecimal is usually parsed into bytes (groups of 2) or some multiplication of bytes.